Why Facebook Wants Your E-Mail

On Monday morning in San Francisco, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled what may be the company's most ambitious technical project yet: An integration of Facebook's internal messaging system with its users' personal e-mail accounts. Facebook customers will now be able to get an e-mail address of the form "paulboutin@facebook.com," but the system will also work with whatever e-mail service they already use.
Facebook isn't pitching this as an alternative to Web-based e-mail like Yahoo Mail, MSN Hotmail, and Google's Gmail. "We don't expect anyone to wake up tomorrow and say I'm going to shut down my Yahoo account and switch exclusively to Facebook," Zuckerberg told the assembled audience in San Francisco. Instead, it's a way to add e-mail as yet another way for Facebook users to connect and converse with others, including those who aren't on Facebook.
Rather than trying to steal customers away from Yahoo, Facebook is trying to bring those customers' existing e-mail accounts into its ever-spreading reach. (Already, according to Nielsen, U.S. Facebook users spend 15 minutes per day on the site.) Should Google launch its rumored social network in the next few months, Facebook users will have less reason to switch to another network simply because it's integrated with Gmail.
Facebook's mail service isn't live yet, but Zuckerberg detailed some of its main features: It will work with desktop and cell-phone e-mail clients via the POP protocol.